Michael Stone Explains His Scale of Evil

Michael Stone is an expert on evil. A forensic psychiatrist and professor at Columbia, Stone has cataloged and classified evil acts into a 22-point scale for his show on the Discovery Channel "Most Evil." Ranging from justified homicide to prolonged rape, torture, and murder, his scale includes names that have haunted the public's dreams, like Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

In his Big Think interview, Dr. Stone explained the breakdown of his scale of evil, which loosely mirrors the structure of Dante's circles of Hell in "The Divine Comedy." The first group, after justified homicide, covers impulsive murders by those who are not actually psychopaths; the middle of the scale includes those with a degree of psychopathic qualities including grandiosity, superficial charm, glibness, manipulativeness, deceit, callousness, and lack of remorse; and numbers 17-22 deal with the truly psychopathic, especially those involved in sexual serial homicide and torture.

Stone also told us what it is like inside the mind of a serial killer. More than 90% of them are psychopaths and sadists, but what drives them to kill varies from person to person. Some of them are loners, incapable of sustained romantic relationships, who will "rape the woman and then kill er to destroy the evidence." Others are seeking revenge, says Stone, even if the real source of their anger, a parent for instance, is projected onto other victims, as with Tommy Lyn Sells in Texas.